


Rosa gallica

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Sherlock;abiding, cliffs, doves on Sunday, sea-spray
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:29:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He belongs to an English captain.  As much as he belongs to anyone.</p>
<p>Strange idea, belonging-to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rosa gallica

**Author's Note:**

> [ Emmadelosnardos](http://archiveofourown.org/users/emmadelosnardos/pseuds/emmadelosnardos)
> 
> \--this is all your fault. ( :

_“_ _But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that sombre, curving mole. It stood at the seawardmost end…Its clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.”—John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman_ **  
  
  
**

He belongs to an English captain.  As much as he belongs to anyone.  (Strange idea, belonging-to; waiting-for is easier, is logical; you can base waiting on criteria, on likelihood, statistical probabilities…but how does one gauge what, or who, is worthy of belonging? One cannot just belong.)

 He’s not good at waiting either, at abiding, but he will.

There is a cliff walk.  There is the _Rosa gallica_ , salted by spray. There is a cottage.  Terns dogging the high drifts, crying.  
  
There’s a woman in the village whose elder son wants her dead. There’s a fisherman who killed once and thinks the world doesn’t know. There’s an old Cold Warrior. There are doves on Sunday. There’s a gun in his pocket and a blade in his shoe.

When he was fifteen, he kissed in a wine cellar, was kissed, then cut and ran, out among the old vines.

Here in this country with its ancestors and its galets and its granites and its grape-must and its thatches, it’s easy to throw up a hood and walk, unseen, among the velvetgrass, the fossils, the sea-limed past… all the way back to the chalk soil of England.

No.  Not that ending; not yet.

Ending # 1:  He’s dead.

Ending #2:  There’s such a lot of sea to stare at.  A lot to wonder, at what you’ve never bothered to find out.

Ending #3:   Who knows if there’ll be time, for that, or that, or that.  Were I fifteen, he thinks, I would have let you kiss me; now I only love you, cut throats, and come home.

 

Beautiful place, this.  He won’t stay long.   

**Author's Note:**

> “Lend me an ear  
> While I read you here  
> A page from your history,  
> Old cliff—not known  
> To your solid stone,  
> Yet yours inseparably…”—Thomas Hardy, “To a Sea-Cliff”
> 
>  
> 
> [Rosa gallica, French rose, Gallic rose, Rose of Provins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_gallica)  
> [ Holcus lanatus, velvet grass, also known as Yorkshire Fog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holcus_lanatus)  
> [Paleontology on the Picardy Coast](http://www.thegoodlifefrance.com/a-french-life-picardy-coast-ignites-passion-of-a-palaeontologist/)


End file.
